Opera Symposium to be Held at UK

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Nov. 6, 2015) — An upcoming symposium presented by the University of Kentucky Opera Research Alliance aims to explore and celebrate the cultural meanings and impact of opera. "Opera, Politics, and Parody in Nineteenth-Century France" will be held 9:30 a.m.-6 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 11, in the Niles Gallery of the Lucille C. Little Fine Arts Library and Learning Center on the UK campus.

The symposium is a scheduled event of the College of Arts and Sciences "Year of Europe," with co-sponsorship by UK School of Music, UK Division of Musicology and Ethnomusicology, the Francophone Music Criticism Network and the Office of the Vice President for Research. It is free and open to the public. 

The symposium will feature international scholars who have all helped to reshape 21^st-century ideas about opera and its social, political, artistic and cultural contexts. The lectures will be followed by a performance of opera arias and ensembles by pianist Cliff Jackson and tenor Gregory Turay, along with other vocalists from UK's School of Music and Opera Theatre. 

The symposium program will begin with a coffee reception, 9:30-10 a.m., followed by the morning session at 10 a.m., with two lectures by British scholars:

· Sarah Hibberd, of University of Nottingham, presenting "Cherubini's 'Médée' and the Politics of Vengeance," and

· Mark Everist, of Southampton University, presenting "Theatre Music and Cultural Transfer in Europe 1800-1870."

After lunch, there will be an afternoon session beginning at 2:30 p.m. featuring:

· Clair Rowden, of Cardiff University, presenting "Du grand au petit: 'Faust' on Parisian stages in 1869," and

· Annegret Fauser, of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, presenting "A Touch of Class: Aristocrats in the Second-Empire Opera House."

In the performance from 5 to 6 p.m., UK Opera Theatre artist-in-residence and doctoral candidate Gregory Turay will sing the impassioned tenor aria from the French grand opera "La Juive" by Fromental Halévy, along with a selection from Jacques Offenbach’s "La belle Hélène." Other vocalists in the UK School of Music and UK Opera Theatre will sing arias and duets from Charles Gounod’s "Faust," Giacomo Meyerbeer’s "Les Huguenots," Fromental Halévy’s "Charles VI," Luigi Cherubini’s "Médée and Offenbach’s "Orphée aux enfers." Performers include Brittany Benningfield, Wanessa Campelo, Marie-France Duclos, Caitlyn Howard, Christopher Kenney, Thabang Masango, Zackery Morris, Whitney Myers, Suzanne Wilmot, and Mary Catherine Wright, who will all be accompanied by Cliff Jackson on piano.

Sarah Hibberd is an associate professor of music at the University of Nottingham in Nottingham, England, and musicologist who specializes in the musical culture of 19^th-century Paris. She published numerous articles and essays as well as the monograph "French Grand Opera and the Historical Imagination" (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and edited the essay collections "Melodramatic Voices: Understanding Music Drama" (2011) and "Art, Theatre and Opera in Paris, 1750-1850" (2014), the latter with Richard Wrigley. Hibberd recently served as Royal Opera writer in residence for the production of Gioachino Rossini’s "Guillaume Tell" at the Royal Opera House, at Covent Garden in London.

Mark Everist, musicologist and professor of music at the University of Southampton in Southampton, England, has published the books "Music Drama at the Paris Odéon, 1824-1828" (2002) and "Giacomo Meyerbeer and Music Drama in Nineteenth-Century Paris" (2005) and many articles in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Revue de Musicologie, Revue Belge de Musicologie, 19^th-Century Music, Cambridge Opera Journal, Music & Letters and Journal of Musicology. Everist is president of the Royal Musical Association, a fellow of the Academia Europaea, former editor of The Journal of the Royal Musical Association, and recipient of publication prizes from the American Musicological Society in 2010 and 2011. 

Clair Rowden, deputy head of the School of Music and senior lecturer at the University of Cardiff in Cardiff, Wales, has published articles and reviews in Revue de Musicologie, Music & Letters, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, Opera, L’Avant-scène Opéra and Musicology Australia, as well as chapters in collected works. She has published several articles on "fin-de-siècle" opera and culture and is also editor of the volume of essays in "Performing Salome, Revealing Stories"(Ashgate, 2013). At present, Rowden is working on a large study of parody and caricature in late-19th and "fin-de-siècle" French opera and culture.

Annegret Fauser, the Cary C. Boshamer Distinguished Professor of Music and adjunct professor of women’s and gender studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is a cultural musicologist who has written about French opera and song, women composers, exoticism, nationalism, reception history and cultural transfer. She is author of "Der Orchestergesang in Frankreich zwischen 1870 und 1920" (1994), "Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair" (2005) and "Sounds of War: Music in the United States during World War II" (2013). Fauser edited a collection of essays with Everist, "Stage Music and Cultural Transfer: Paris, 1830-1914" (2009), which was awarded the Ruth A. Solie Award of the American Musicological Society. From 2011 to 2013, she served as the editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society. 

For more information about the symposium and performance, contact Diana Hallman, associate professor of musicology and coordinator of the UK Opera Research Alliance, by email to diana.hallman@uky.edu.

MEDIA CONTACT: Whitney Hale, 859-257-8716; whitney.hale@uky.edu